Tomiichi Murayama, Japanese Leader Who Gave Landmark War Apology, Dies at 101

His televised address as prime minister, delivered 50 years to the day after Japan announced its surrender, set a marker for his country’s “deep remorse” over wartime atrocities.

Tomiichi Murayama, a backbench legislator in Japan who was unexpectedly elevated to prime minister in 1994 at 70 and the next year delivered the country’s most forthright and enduring apology for atrocities inflicted by Japanese troops in World War II, died on Friday in Oita, in Kyushu province. He was 101.

His death, in a hospital, was announced by the Social Democratic Party of Oita.

Mr. Murayama delivered his historic apology on national television on the morning of Aug. 15, 1995, 50 years to the day after Japan announced it would surrender unconditionally to the United States. The words of contrition were brief and cautiously worded, completed in less than five minutes.

“I regard, in a spirit of humility, these irrefutable facts of history,” he said, “and express here once again my feelings of deep remorse and state my heartfelt apology.

“Our task,” he continued, “is to convey to younger generations the horrors of war so that we never repeat the errors in our history.”

His proclamation was the defining achievement of Mr. Murayama’s 18 months in office. He had gone further than any previous Japanese leader in expressing regrets for the killing, torture and rape of millions of civilians and other atrocities in countries Japan occupied during the war.

Mr. Murayama had been sharply constrained by conservatives in his governing coalition, and his apology was not strong enough to ease resentment in China and South Korea, whose citizens had suffered under Japanese occupation. It also rankled Japanese nationalists.

Japan’s war crimes across Asia often overshadowed the suffering and destruction endured by Japan’s civilian population during the war. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians had been killed in the firebombing of their cities and in the first — and still only — use of atomic bombs. Two million Japanese soldiers died during the war.

By the time of Mr. Murayama’s campaign, Japan had replaced ruined cities with glittering metropolises and become a global economic power. Its pride had grown, and there was little enthusiasm among its leaders to look back, even less for a public showing of regret.

Still, Mr. Murayama set a marker. For years, prime ministers repeated the Murayama phrases “deep remorse” and “heartfelt apologies” in their addresses commemorating the end of the war.

Mr. Murayama’s rise to prime minister on June 30, 1994, came as a surprise. He was 70 years old. He had served quietly in the House of Representatives for more than 20 years and was not known nationally. He had never held a cabinet position, nor did he have experience negotiating on behalf of the government with countries outside Japan.

He was tall, thin, easygoing and grandfatherly, with wild, shaggy eyebrows. “He wasn’t charismatic,” Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Sophia University in Tokyo, said in an interview. “He wasn’t particularly inspiring. He didn’t have name recognition. He was a down-to-earth, ordinary sort of guy, not a typical politician.”

Mr. Murayama became prime minister as the solution to a political crisis.

His pacifist Japan Socialist Party had for decades been the weak rival of the dominant nationalistic and conservative Liberal Democratic Party. In June 1994, during a recession and political turmoil, both parties were struggling for survival. In desperation, the conservatives invited the socialists to join them and a smaller third party to form a governing coalition.

The socialists recoiled, but the conservatives brought them into the coalition with an irresistible offer: The socialists could have the post of prime minister. About a year earlier, in another round of horse trading, Mr. Murayama had agreed to serve as chairman of the Socialist Party. Now, as chairman, he was catapulted into Japan’s highest political office.

The coalition was an awkward, lopsided deal that left Mr. Murayama at the mercy of the Liberal Democrats. They greatly outnumbered the socialists and took most of the seats in the cabinet, crucial positions that a prime minister would normally fill with allies.

Mr. Murayama backed away from most of the socialists’ goals, but his powerful partners permitted him to move toward his party’s longtime goal of reconciliation.

He had to negotiate every step. He got a watered-down version of his apology endorsed by the House of Representatives only by threatening to resign. Before he went on television, the coalition cabinet halfheartedly approved his speech. Mr. Murayama had wanted a more extravagant, ceremonial staging, but his coalition partners blocked him.

Shortly after Mr. Murayama’s landmark address, half of the members of the coalition cabinet humiliated him with a showy offering of prayers at the Yasukuni Shrine, a bastion of nationalism in Tokyo that venerates Japan’s war criminals and the battlefield sacrifices of its other military war dead.

“It was a symbolic repudiation of the tenor and purpose of the speech,” said John W. Dower, who taught Japanese history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1999 book, “Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II.”

The apology, enshrined by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs as the Murayama Statement, was the culmination of a yearlong drive for conciliation. Mr. Murayama talked about it in his first policy address.

One of his main points in reconciliation was the issue of comfort women — the term was a euphemism Japan adopted to describe the estimated 200,000 women, many of them Korean, who had been forced to work in government-run brothels serving Japanese soldiers, often near the front lines.

Survivors of the ordeal told stories of cruelty and abuse. The women were living evidence of Japan’s atrocities and helped Japan and the world understand why an apology was needed.

Mr. Murayama persuaded the government to set up, in 1995, an organization called the Asian Women’s Fund. A joint governmental and charitable enterprise, it offered medical care and some compensation for the women for more than a decade.

The organization helped draw widespread attention to the suffering, but only a few hundred of the surviving 1,000 or so women benefited. Some were too embarrassed to come forward, historians said, and others felt insulted that instead of recognizing a debt, the government had shifted responsibility for compensation to a charity.

Mr. Murayama became president of the fund when he retired from Parliament in 2000 and stayed on until it closed in 2007. In 2006, both the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the U.S. Congress issued statements in support of the women. A decade later, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon brought one of the survivors to U.N. headquarters in New York to highlight their plight.

Tomiichi Murayama, the seventh of 11 children, was born on March 3, 1924, in the fishing and mining city of Oita, in the far south of Japan. He was in junior high school when his father, a fisherman, died. His mother worked at menial jobs to keep the family going.

He was accepted into the prestigious Meiji University in Tokyo, but his studies were interrupted by the war. He was sent to work in a shipyard and later drafted into the Japanese Army; was in officer candidate school when the war ended. He returned to Meiji and graduated in 1946, a year after the surrender.

Mr. Murayama joined the Japan Socialist Party and worked for nine years as an organizer in a fishermen’s union in Oita before being elected to the Oita City Council. He moved up to the Oita prefecture government and, in 1972, was elected to the House of Representatives.

Mr. Murayama is survived by two daughters, Mari Murayama and Yuri Nakahara; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. His wife, Yoshie, died last year.

Mr. Murayama lived in Oita after retiring from Parliament, but he often went back to Tokyo and traveled to other countries, giving interviews and making speeches encouraging respect for Japan’s neighbors and warning against the savagery of war.

Mr. Murayama was a skilled calligrapher. During the Covid pandemic, he donated three of his works to the municipal archive in Shanghai, saying that he hoped his art would cheer up the people in China who had found themselves at the center of the outbreak.

A few years earlier, Mr. Murayama had created another piece of calligraphy for China. “Japan-Chinese friendship,” it read. “Credibility comes from being true to one’s words.”

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